What Profit A Man
by Signy1
Summary: Episode tag to 'Is There A Traitor In The House.' Sometimes there are no good choices. Sometimes it's not a matter of avoiding damnation, just a question of which road to take to hell. Sometimes a man has to choose between paying the price of action or the price of inaction, knowing beforehand that either will bankrupt him. Sometimes there's no comfort to offer. 2020 PBA medalist.


Newkirk was behind the delousing station, idly rolling a couple of ball bearings from one hand to another; LeBeau found him there within fifteen minutes.

"_Mon pote_, you need to find another place to go when you are feeling miserable," he said. "Everyone knows about this one."

"No matter," Newkirk said. "Not like I have any secrets left, now do I?"

"This is about Berlin Betty, no?"

"Her? No, actually. She's nothing. I was just thinking about the price of souls."

As left-field comments went, that took a prize, LeBeau thought. Newkirk was about the least religious man LeBeau had ever met. "Were you considering buying one?"

"Why not? Sold my own, didn't I?" He contemplated the silver spheres. "Can't grumble, of course; a secret ball bearing factory was probably more than the ruddy thing was worth in the first place."

LeBeau reached over, gently took the ball bearings from his hand. "You did your duty," he said quietly.

"I bloody well committed treason, Louie. Aid and comfort to the enemy. You do realize that, if I make it back, I'll likely hang for it, don't you?" He picked up a single silver ball from the dozens of them scattered across the ground, ostentatiously displayed it, then made it vanish. "Even if I don't, you made a show of beating the tar out of me when you heard what I was up to. The lads back home won't be pretending. It's one thing knowing that your enemies want to see the color of your blood. I can handle that. It's rather different when your own side wants to do it themselves. Which they will. In their place, I would, too."

"You… you have done a brave thing. This will save many lives."

"Not saying it wasn't the right thing to do. In fact, it was probably the _only_ thing to do." He shrugged. "Better me than half of Europe, I'd say. And maybe I'll get lucky and catch a bullet before I have to go back and face the consequences." He plucked the ball bearing from thin air with a flourish, vanished it again.

"You do not mean that, Pierre." No. Newkirk could not mean that. He could not be allowed to mean that. With a sickening flash of memory, LeBeau remembered the furious, devil-take-the-consequences man he had met in the cooler all those years ago, the one who was so desperately chasing either freedom or death, and no longer particularly cared which one caught up with him first.

What would that man have done if going home—_ever_—had suddenly ceased to be an option?

"No, I daresay I don't," Newkirk agreed, which, momentarily at least, was a relief. Unfortunately, though, he kept talking. "I need to get back at least long enough to apologize to Mavis. Least I could do. Cor, the neighbors are going to be on her like a flock of vultures. It was shameful enough for the poor girl when I was just a criminal, without being a traitor, too."

_Not so easy an assignment; he's got to think about the firing squad and remember the new code, all at the same time. _He remembered Hogan saying that. It had somehow not occurred to him that Hogan had been talking about the British response, not the German one.

"Mind you, I owe the Colonel—all you lot, really— an apology for trying to back out at the last minute the way I did," Newkirk continued. "It wasn't fair of me. I panicked, is all, worthless, cowardly bastard that I am. And I'm sorry." His hand stuttered to a stop mid-vanish, and he let it fall gracelessly to his side, clenched into a white-knuckled fist.

"Panicked? Are you sure that's the word you want? She was very… persuasive." LeBeau didn't know what to do with the other part of that sentence. Pretending that it had not been spoken was probably not a very good way of handling it, and the minute he came up with a better one he'd go back and fix it. Somehow. He had to.

"I suppose she was. I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe anything that would make the whole bloody business go _away_."

"So it really wasn't anything to do with her family being held hostage? Or how pretty she was?"

"Louie, she could have looked like Goebbels in a dress. Hell, she could have _been_ Goebbels in a dress for all I cared. All I wanted was an excuse not to do it. Any excuse. This wasn't like our other missions. This was different. This was me telling the brass in London about a factory they needed to bomb… and telling the rest of my country that we aren't worth fighting for." His Adam's apple moved as he swallowed, one tiny flicker of movement in a face turned to stone, and his voice remained perfectly even as he took a breath and went on. He might almost have been discussing the weather. "For that alone I _should_ swing. I deserve it."

"That is not true," LeBeau said hotly. This was getting worse and worse by the moment. "You know that is not true. Idiot! Any man can play the hero for an audience. Allowing yourself to play the coward… that was a braver act than most could ever dream of achieving."

"That sounds all lovely and philosophical, but it doesn't change anything. Whatever my reasons for saying what I did, whatever I intended by it, the fact remains that _I said it. _Half of England's going to be listening to that twaddle. What if they believe it's true? Believe we should just give up? I'll have done the Nazis' work for them."

"They will not believe any such thing, and they will certainly not surrender because of it. Not on the strength of a fifteen minute propaganda piece— no one could possibly be as stupid as that. You have done nothing wrong, _mon pote_. Nothing, do you hear me? This was not a thing to be ashamed of."

"Didn't say I was ashamed, mate. I did what needed to be done, and there's an end to it." With a visible effort, he lifted his hand, forcing the motion back to something like his usual grace, and opened his fist to reveal half a dozen ball bearings that had appeared from seemingly nowhere. Slowly, he let them spill back to the ground with all the others. "I said I'm a dead man walking. So? Hard cheese for me. I'll live with it. Right up until they say different."

"No! A prisoner under duress cannot be blamed for anything his captors force him to say. And if there is trouble, _le Colonel _will think of something. You will be fine."

"I'm fine now. And the Colonel's got more important things to worry about, so don't you go fussing at him. I mean it, Louie. Leave it be. We've still got a job to do."

"No, we do not; not for some time yet, in any case. Kinch thinks it will take at least ten days, perhaps more, before the Underground will be able to get us replacement parts for the radio. And _Colonel_ Hogan said that we would have to lie low for at least that long, anyway."

"Sounds good to me," Newkirk said. "A few days holiday never did anyone any harm."

"Indeed. And neither did a few good meals. Come. I have made _cassoulet_." He put an arm on Newkirk's shoulder. "This will be all right, _mon ami_. We have overcome far more hopeless situations than this one. Do not worry."

"The only thing I'm worried about is dinner. What's in 'kess-sue-lay,' then? Eel heads, frogs, snails, or just the usual two pounds of garlic?"

*.*.*

LeBeau was somehow not surprised when, at roll call the next day, Newkirk mouthed off to short-tempered Corporal Jager and was unceremoniously dragged away for three days in solitary.

The cooler, after all, got a great less foot traffic than the spot behind the delousing shed.

*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*

Author's note: This is both a tag to the 'Is There a Traitor In The House' episode, and, I suppose, a 'might have been' from my story 'As I Shall Laugh.' It doesn't fit in that story, but I didn't want to leave it to languish in the 'unused snippets and vignettes' file. So here it is.

This episode is problematic at best. Newkirk wasn't exaggerating about the potential results of making a broadcast like that— as several radio propagandists found out after the war— and the urgency didn't really seem to fit the situation. (Ball bearings? Really? This couldn't have waited a couple of days while they fixed their radio?) It seems like the writers fell into the 'Dramatic thing happens because… because… er, reasons,' trap. They wanted the no-win situation of forcing him into either betraying his country in a minor, visible way, or betraying it in a major, but invisible, way, and sacrificing his integrity either way; they just didn't quite know how to get there convincingly. To be fair, that's a big theme to tackle in half an hour, and frankly, it doesn't quite work as comedy anyhow. And tacking on yet another example of his execrable luck with women seemed more like kicking him when he was down than it did humor.


End file.
